Facebook the Top Searched Term in U.S. -  Experian reported this week that Facebook topped its list of the most search terms in the United States for the third year in a row, making up 3.1% of all searches. [Image Via Experian]

Facebook Completes Move to Menlo Park - The company moved the last of 2,000 employees from its Palo Alto office into a ten-building, 1-million square foot campus in Menlo Park on Monday. Facebook hopes to one day accommodate up to 9,400 employees there.

North Social’s Facebook Page Don’ts -  North Social put together a video montage of the worst things brands can do to gain fans on their Facebook pages.

Modea’s Wisdom Tree App, Find Gifts For Friends - An app from digital agency Modea allows users to select a friend, answer a few questions about them, and then suggests the perfect (gag) gift for this friend.

Below is an excerpt of this week’s full Featured Facebook Campaigns entry in the Facebook Marketing Bible, which also includes detailed breakdowns of over 100 other Facebook marketing campaigns by top-performing brands and other organization on Facebook.

Ultimat Vodka’s Social Life Audit

Goal: Brand Loyalty, Product Purchase, Engagement, Network Exposure

Method: Ultimat Vodka created an app, Social Life Audit, that culls a users’ data and creates a customized social “score” and infographic.

Core Mechanic: We spoke to Paul Aaron with Amalgamated, who worked on the Social Life Audit campaign for Ultimat Vodka and he told us that the app itself was tightly integrated into the company’s brand.

“Our overall goal was to create more widespread buzz and word-of-mouth that got people thinking about Ultimate Vodka,” he told us. “Facebook is where people go to be social and spirit brands are inherently social brands. Social Life Audit was part of a broader campaign targeting overworked, high-end consumers who are craving balance in their lives.”

The vodka product is a mix of wheat, rye and potato vodkas, therein is marketed as being well-balanced. Aaron told us that the broader Ultimat campaign was precise and targeted via print and digital, but that the Facebook app generated the most buzz for the brand. Users not only get their own personalized infographic when using the app (which also generates ticker stories), but they can share this to the stream when they are finished.

It is this part of the app — the sharing — that Aaron said was the most potent of the campaign. “When people use the app and get their score, they are encouraged to post them, which in turn, gets tagged and added to their photo albums. About halfway through making Social Life Audit, we knew we had something special on our hands, but we didn’t know that it would garner as much traffic s it did.”

Overall Aaron told us the app, with impressions on- and off-line, delivered CPM that was a fraction of print or banner ads. This was of particular value, since the brand didn’t have a big advertising budget.

Impact: The Page was created at the end of November and currently stands at 10,100 Likes.

Nasty Gals’ Epic Holiday Giveaway

Goal: Page Growth, Email List, Brand Loyalty, Product Purchase, Network Exposure

Method: Nasty Gal is a clothing company hosting an email entry sweepstakes giving away a gift card every day until Christmas for two weeks.

Core Mechanic: The sweepstakes asks users to enter an email to win one of the gift cards, ranging from $200 to $1,000. The sweepstakes is Like-gated and allows users to share their entry to the stream.

Impact: The sweepstakes is simple and appears to have brought in about 10,000 Likes since it began in early December, according to PageData. The Page currently stands at 146,800 Likes.

Want to learn how top brands are designing their Facebook marketing campaigns? See the Facebook Marketing Bible for detailed breakdowns of hundreds of Featured Campaigns by top-performing brands and businesses on Facebook.

The software places a cookie in user browsers, then tracks consumer behavior on a commerce website, then translates that behavior to the user’s experience within the brand’s Facebook store. When a consumer visits the Facebook Page, the product recommendations are tailored to the consumer’s search and purchase behavior on the website.

Barilliance co-founder Ido Ariel says the company’s core technology is product recommendations. The back end of Barilliance’s software allows retailers to target by first or returning customer, referring traffic source, location and product. On the website this looks like a banner and on Facebook it’s within an ecommerce tab.

Specifically this could look like a 10% off or free shipping banner, an offer for customers who made a purchase in the last month, specific items of interest, for a particular region, or a combination of these, Ariel says. Visitors to a retail website will see the same or similar offers on both platforms.

Ariel tells us that Barilliance wants to extend this technology from web and Facebook commerce for other products, such as email newsletters and chat. “It’s better to keep customers happy and loyal than acquire new customers,” he says. Barilliance’s technology, then aims to convert visitors into customers via personalizing recommendations.

Barilliances’ 100-plus ecommerce customers are mainly in the United States.

Below is an excerpt of this week’s full Featured Facebook Campaigns entry in the Facebook Marketing Bible, which also includes detailed breakdowns of over 100 other Facebook marketing campaigns by top-performing brands and other organization on Facebook.

Harley-Davidson’s Fan Machine

Goal: Brand Loyalty, Engagement, Network Exposure, Product Purchase

Method: Using an application called the Fan Machine Harley-Davidson the company is soliciting feedback from users on a marketing campaign for the company’s products.

Core Mechanic: Fan Machine presents an advertising brief from the company and asks users to submit and vote on ideas for that campaign. Users can submit ideas, vote, share ideas to the stream.

Impact: The Page currently stands at 2.8 million Likes and according to PageData the Page has seen steady growth.

Simplehuman’s Hello Design Game

Goal: Engagement, Network Exposure, Product Purchase

Method: The Hello Design game allows users to play an engaging and fun game matching up items “meant” for each other, such as Simplehuman’s soap container and sensor pumps.

Core Mechanic: The Like-gated game prompts users to match up items, such as a hot dog and bun, that go together. Playing the game creates a ticker feed story, then once a user gets a score they are entered to win prizes and may publish their score to the feed.

Impact: PageData shows that the Page, currently at 5,100 Likes, has gained momentum in recent weeks.

Want to learn how top brands are designing their Facebook marketing campaigns? See the Facebook Marketing Bible for detailed breakdowns of hundreds of Featured Campaigns by top-performing brands and businesses on Facebook.

In order to retrieve the information users simply click on the link on Facebook, which goes back to the ZipShare website, download and they’re done. While this isn’t the only file sharing service that utilizes Facebook, ZipShare distinguishes itself for being so quick to use,and be being free of ads, delays and pop-ups.

Prescott Lee of ZipShare said this was all intentional. The app was meant to be simple, and to fill a gap that exists on Facebook, which allows for easy sharing of video and photo files but not things like Excel files or PowerPoint presentations. ZipShare even allows for a package of multiple types of files to be bundled into a zip file at once with the app.

Currently ZipShare allows for a 20 MB limit per upload, with users capped at a total of 100 MB. The files stay on the servers for 7 days, then expire and the space frees up again. “this is really the first foray into social [for WinZip] but there are other things we are thinking about right now,” Lee said. He added that, in the week prior to its release, hundreds of folks took advantage of an email invite signup to be among the first to use the app.

A week into its release the app already has several thousand users, he added. People today often connect with friends primarily via Facebook rather than email or old instant messaging clients, so there’s a need for socially-focused file sharing services like ZipShare.

You can see the full week’s coverage in the Facebook Marketing Bible, which also includes detailed breakdowns of over 100 other featured campaigns by top-performing brands and businesses on Facebook.

“Homeland’s” WatchCareful.ly

Goal: Engagement, Brand Loyalty, Viewers

Core Mechanic: A branded website that utilizes Facebook Connect to allow users to play a few games tightly related to the upcoming show “Homeland.”

Game: The games are actually really interesting because of how they mimic the types of games played on the Facebook platform everyday, but in a “Homeland”-specific iteration. For example, there’s a video to watch, words to descramble (a secret message), photo alteration ID (intelligence) and listening to talking then answer questions about the conversations (quizzes).

Method: The show is about a CIA agent suspicious about the loyalties of a Marine recently rescued and returned from Afghanistan, and the games on the website are tightly woven into this narrative. The games are fun and interesting, not too long or boring, but the Facebook authorization feature doesn’t really publish content to the stream — it seems like the show is missing out on some social distribution here. Once they complete the four levels, users can unlock content such as the unedited pilot of the show and show-related documents that give background on the characters.

Impact: Perhaps for the sharing problem, the Page currently stands at about 15,000 Likes before next week’s premiere. The WatchCareful.ly website is promoted both as a tab on the Page, and in status updates on the Page. PageData shows that the Page grew significantly starting last week.

Capital One, Zynga’s Three-Game Promotion

Goal: Network Exposure, Engagement, Brand Loyalty, Page Growth

Core Mechanic: Capital One and Zynga are engaging in a three-game promotion across CityVille, FarmVille and The Pioneer Trail.

Game: In CityVille, players may place branded Capital One banks in their cities, resulting in a decorative item, energy, experience points and other payouts. In the other two games, players may interact with characters from Capital One’s commercials. FarmVille’s integration allows users who visit or participate in Capital one’s farm receive a breedable, limited edition Capital One Goat with a high value, as well as the chance to get some “animal grow.” In The Pioneer Trail, players can earn branded quest rewards and permanent in-game items.

Method: In each game the integrations redirect users to Capital One’s Facebook Page. The CityVille integration is on for 30 days, while the other two will last for 10 days.

Impact: As mentioned, this integration redirects to Capital One’s Page, which began to see some significant growth last week right after the partnership launched. The Page is currently at 2.3 million Likes and a week ago it was at 1.5 million, according to PageData.

How are top brands in the industry designing their Facebook marketing campaigns? See the Facebook Marketing Bible for detailed breakdowns of hundreds of Featured Campaigns by top-performing brands and businesses on Facebook.

Similar to Facebook’s news feed and notifications, the features show users relevant suggestions about what webpages to visit based on the behaviors of their friends and people similar to them, and alert them to actions such as other replying to their comments. To make these suggestions more compelling, Badgeville augments the activity stream entries with Facebook Open Graph protocol meta data that sites have added to their pages, and identifies a user’s friends and interests by piggybacking on Facebook registration.

Through Social Fabric, Badgeville lets websites integrate of the most engaging mechanics used by Facebook to drive more page views, conversions, and time-on-site. With more flexibility for data collection and display, Badgeville is now a competitor as well a complement to some of Facebook’s social plugins.

In just a year since launching, Badgeville has found success in assisting web publishers with increasing traffic. It now has 85 customers including NBC, Universal Music Group, and Orange telecom, has done $5-10 million in sales. Its team numbers 35 and it raised a $12.2 million Series B round in July bringing it to $15 million in total funding. The company says it clients experience a 25% or greater increase in user behavior.

Badgeville founder Kris Duggan tells us his company “isn’t walking from gamification” that formed the core of the product we reviewed last year. The Badgeville platform still allows sites to reward points, reputation, spots on leaderboards, and badges to loyal users. Instead, its layering the social graph over gamification such that users stay engaged not just because they’re formally rewarded, but because it’s easy to discover content vetted by their friends and people with similar behavior patterns to them while they earn these rewards.

Duggan explains that currently, sites that integrate Facebook plugins are focusing too much on the interest graph and not enough on what he calls the “behavior graph” — what people are actually doing rather than what they say they’re interested in. Badgeville lets sites track and/or display what visitors read, review, or purchase, “not just that a friend Liked a site’s Page three years ago, not just that they shared something.”

In this way, Badgeville is looking to replace Facebook’s Activity Feed and Recommendations social plugins that only report explicit behaviors of users. With 2.5 million sites having already integrated Facebook’s free plugins, its logical to assume there’s a premium market waiting to be addressed.

Now, sites who license Social Fabric can select which user behaviors they track for internal analysis, and which the surface through the activity stream and notifications. For example, it could show an activity story whenever a friend visits a URL on the site. That Page’s title or headline can be determined by crawling its Open Graph protocol meta data, which Duggan says 80% clients already have in place. Clients can also decide what actions trigger notifcations, such as comment replies or that a friend commented on the same page.

There are some privacy issues Badgeville will need to be careful with. Surfacing explicit actions such as shares or comments isn’t a big deal, but users might not want what they read or purchase shown to their friends or strangers. Duggan says that Badgeville advises clients, but doesn’t have an privacy messaging set up to accompany its widgets with disclaimers that inform users as to what will be published.

He says he doesn’t see privacy flare-ups harming Badgeville’s reputation as “we’re just the infrastructure”. But if a client gets slammed for publishing to a user’s friends that they bought an embarrassing product or read a controversial article similar to Facebook’s ill-fated Beacon, you can expect some backlash and dropped contracts for Badgeville. Therefore, the ability to display privacy warnings should be a high priority for the company.

Facebook is known for its massive time-on-site and reengagement metrics, which in part stem from the engrossing nature of the news feed and notifications, but the social plugins it currently offers can’t track or report as much data as sites might want. Using Badgeville’s flexible platform to inject the social graph alongside these mechanics into their own content-rich websites, clients may be able to inspire similar engagement by ensuring users always have relevant suggestions of where to click next.

Facebook Settles With Lamebook – Lamebook, a humor site publishing funny Facebook posts, and Facebook settled this week. The judge refused to move the suit to California, and thus, some speculate that Facebook settled to avoid jury sympathy for the Austin-based company.

Facebook Extends Comment Period – Facebook extended the comment period for its new privacy policy to 5 p.m. Pacific on September 7. Comments may be left at Facebook’s Site Governance Page.

Facebook Testing Comment Ordering? – AllFacebook reported that Facebook seems to be testing a way for Page admins to order comments based on social ranking, chronology or reverse chronology. [Image via AllFacebook]

Facebook Pays $40,000 in Bounty Program – Facebook’s Bug Bounty program has, thus far, paid out $40,000 to people around the world who have reported issues to the company. Chief Security Officer Joe Sullivan wrote a blog about the program this week with more information.

Interesting Insights on Facebook Ads – SocialCode reported some interesting trends about Facebook ads, including: women are 11% more likely to click, older women are more likely to click through and men are slightly more likely to Like an ad.

HTML5 Mobile App Allows for Connect – Nitobi, creators of PhoneGap, launched a new plugin, PhoneGap Facebook Connect. Essentially it allows users to login to HTML and JavaScript apps with their Facebook login.

Social Networks and Patents – Business Week published an interesting story examining the lack of a “patent war” when it comes to social media companies like Facebook and Twitter. One reason the magazine speculated, is that Facebook (for example) only holds 12 patents, which is to say, there aren’t as many patents to fight over.

Facebook Developer Blog: Fluid Canvas – Facebook’s Developer blog posted this week about how to build an app on Facebook with Fluid Canvas, to expand the size of apps, depending on a user’s screen resolution.

Other Announcements:

Appbistro Announces PPI Ads for Page Apps – Appbistro announced that the company now installs apps for Page admins, thus the company has seen a 190% increase in installs, recently hitting 100,000 registered Page admins.

Vitrue Releases SaaS 3.0 – Vitrue released version 3.0 of its social media platform, which includes new localization features, analytics and metrics.

Hootsuite Deepens Facebook Integration – AllFacebook reports that HootSuite has deepened its Facebook integration, specifically adding events, photos, groups, and geo-tool updates.

15% of Posts are Likejacked – Norton’s analysis of 3.5 million video posts in August found that 15% were scams, or like jacking. Norton Safe Web for Facebook is an app that may guard against this type of attack.

Most notably, companies like Microsoft and Yahoo have been taking advantage of the platform’s authentication service (formerly known as Connect) to help users sign in to their other services using Facebook, and then sync the relevant Facebook user information to their service. Bing, for example, lets you sign in with Facebook, then shows you search results that your friends have Liked.

Our AppData traffic tracking service highlights the scale of the Facebook traffic for some of these apps today. By monthly active users, Bing is now the seventh largest app on the Facebook platform, with 28.9 million today. Windows Live Messenger is in tenth place at 21.5 million, and Yahoo is right after it with 20.9 million people. By daily active users, Messenger handily beats top social game CityVille to the number one spot, with 18.1 million people. Yahoo is in third place with 11.8 million and Bing is in tenth with 4.28 million. Other companies with large Facebook numbers on our list include TripAdvisor, Yelp and VEVO for Artists.

Check out the graphs below to get a sense for these apps’ trajectories. But first:

Strategic Implications of Facebook’s Prevalence

If nothing else, these numbers illustrate that large sites that integrate Facebook can get serious traffic. Depending on how the integration is done, Facebook could be driving new traffic by encouraging more users to bother signing up, and engaging existing users by making the products more valuable through the use of Facebook data. But if the integrations are done poorly, companies could just be encouraging more users to view Facebook as the center of the web (and the owner of their data), without more value being created. Or, users might simply sign in at some point with Facebook but get nothing out of it — resulting in big stats, but nothing substantive.

It is this complicated set of costs and benefits that helped convince Apple to not do its own Facebook integration with Ping last year. And, as far as we know, Facebook purposefully blocked then stonewalled a deal with Twitter because it was concerned that Twitter would be able to get the better side of the deal, essentially funneling more Facebook users to Twitter. The result of these two issues is that Apple has anointed Twitter as the main social sign-in service for iOS 5, leaving Facebook mostly excluded.

The data here shows what Twitter and Apple might be missing out on. The flip-side is that Facebook’s dealmaking has left it in a worse position for reaching iOS users.

Anyway, here are the biggest Facebook integrations today, by MAU and DAU:

Bing

Windows Live Messenger

Yahoo

TripAdvisor

Yelp

VEVO for Artists

We’ve excerpted two of the campaigns below. You can see the full week’s coverage in the Facebook Marketing Bible, which also includes detailed breakdowns of over 100 other featured campaigns by top-performing brands and businesses on Facebook.

Be President of Dunkin’ Nation

Goal: Network Exposure, Page Growth, Product Purchase

Core Mechanic: Dunkin’ Donuts is combining a promotion on its Page with check-in services from Facebook and Foursquare to give away prizes.

Method: Users may check in once an hour up to 10 times per day from one of the location services after registering on the Facebook Page in order to win. Participants who check in often enough may be crowned the “President of Dunkin’ Nation” and other users are eligible to win a daily sweepstakes of prizes including an LCD TV, gift cards, t-shirts, mugs and more.

Impact: The promotion begins today and runs until September 23.

Milyoni’s Social Theater Screening of “The Big Lebowski”

Goal: Product Purchase, Brand Loyalty

Core Mechanic: A Facebook purchase of a movie from the Page that may be viewed an unlimited amount of times in a 48 hours period.

Method: Users simply visit the film’s Facebook Page, click on the Social Theater (beta) tab and then agree to purchase the film with Facebook Credits. Buyers have the chance to share their purchase to the stream and save five of their friends  $1 dollar off the rental price of $3, or 30 Credits.

Impact: Facebook says the Watch The Big Lebowski app has 296 MAU, which isn’t necessarily bad given that it’s a movie rental and it’s currently in beta. The app is part of Milyoni’s new Social Theater app.